Citizens work together to come up with their county’s AI policies
Cascade PBS — Artificial Intelligence is rapidly evolving, and many local governments are still struggling to catch up and figure out how — or if — they should be using it. In Snohomish County, local leaders decided to try an experiment.
They convened what’s known as a “civic assembly” of 29 randomly selected county residents to deliberate on AI and come up with policy recommendations.
The idea was prompted in part by a series of articles published by Cascade PBS and KNKX last summer. Using thousands of pages of chatlogs obtained through public records requests, we reported on how city officials in Everett had experimented with AI tools like ChatGPT for a variety of tasks.
That reporting raised questions about transparency. It also caught the eye of local leaders in Snohomish County.